Newsmakers

The National Council for Research on Women elected Victoria Budson MPA 2002, executive director of the Woman and Public Policy Program, to its board of directors. The council is a network of 100 leading U.S. women’s research and policy centers.

Sheila Burke MPA 1982, former executive dean of the Kennedy School and current deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the Smithsonian Institution, was recently named chair of the Kaiser Family Foundation Board of Trustees.

Pippa Norris, lecturer in comparative politics, won the Virginia Hodgkinson Research Prize this year for her book Sacred and Secular. In addition, William Ryan, research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, won an honorable mention for his book Governance as Leadership. The award, sponsored by the Independent Sector, recognizes outstanding published research that furthers understanding of philanthropy, voluntary action, nonprofits, and civil society either in the United States or abroad.

Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was featured in the documentary “The O.J. Verdict,” which aired as part of PBS’s Frontline series in October. Presented 10 years after the verdict, the show explored the dominant role that race played in the controversial murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

Nina Singh MPA 2004 won the President’s Police Medal for Outstanding and Meritorious Services, which is awarded every year on the occasion of India’s Independence Day. The medal recognizes outstanding police service in the country. She is the first female police officer in the state of Rajasthan to have been chosen for the honor.

Robert Putnam and Michael Ignatieff were included among the top 100 public intellectuals selected by Britain’s Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. Ignatieff, a professor of human rights practice, is the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Putnam, a professor of public policy, is author of the bestselling book Bowling Alone.

Frederick Schauer, professor of the First Amendment, was appointed professor at the University of Oxford for the 2007–2008 academic year. The professorship was endowed by George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company to allow Oxford to invite American scholars to the university on a visiting basis. Schauer is expected to deliver 24 lectures during the year.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Willman, an investigative journalist for The Los Angeles Times, was awarded the Shorenstein Center’s first annual David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism in October. Nyhan, a Boston Globe columnist and 2001 Shorenstein fellow, died unexpectedly in January 2005.

The Honoring Contributions in the Governance of American Indian Nations awards program honored 14 American Indian tribal government initiatives in November. Since the program began in 1998, more than one-quarter of the tribes in the United States have applied for an award and 78 tribal government initiatives have been honored.

Senior research fellow Marion Fremont-Smith’s book Governing Nonprofit Organizations won the 2005 ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action) award for “Outstanding Book in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research.”